


Five Abandoned Ships the Raza Didn't Salvage (and one they did)

by Sholio



Category: Dark Matter (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Developing Friendships, Families of Choice, Festivals, Gen, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26981146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they?
Relationships: Five | Das & Three | Marcus Boone, Three | Marcus Boone & Two | Portia Lin
Comments: 17
Kudos: 29
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Five Abandoned Ships the Raza Didn't Salvage (and one they did)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [days4daisy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/days4daisy/gifts).



**1\. Fell into a black hole**

"Sure, yeah, we can get everything out before the freighter falls into the black hole," Three muttered, white-knuckling on the seat of the Marauder as Six fought to steer them out of the black hole's gravity well. "Yeah, see if I ever trust any of you ever again. Maybe you're just lying and trying to kill me and take my stuff."

"We don't trust you either," One snapped across the space between the seats. "And there's nothing you have that any of us want, because your stuff is mostly junk."

"Hey! My weapons are top quality!"

"Like you'd even know; none of us can remember anything. Anyway, what's the point of killing you for your stuff if you _and_ your top-quality weapons are lost in a black hole?"

"Could everyone shut up back there and let me concentrate?" Six demanded, while Two gave them a deeply exasperated look over the back of her seat.

Back on the Raza, Three tried to start a betting pool on "most likely to be murdered by the rest of us," but no one would take him up on it. Although he later found that someone had marked down his number. Probably One. Probably in retaliation for Three picking _his_ number, although Three could also make a pretty good case for Four as either murderer or murderee.

("Is murderee a word?" he asked the kid when they passed in the hallway, with the kid—as usual—leaving as much room between them as possible, like she thought he was going to try to grab her if she got too close. She gave him an alarmed look and scampered off in the direction of the vents. "Hey! I was just asking a friendly question!")

He needed to get off this ship as soon as possible and go his own way. Yeah.

**2\. Space zombies**

'Nuff said.

**3\. Actually haunted**

It wasn't very long since they'd lost One and got the gang back together, more or less. It was weird having a new person on the ship (Nyx) and not having someone they'd gotten used to. Three thought that, even more than One's absence, it was Five's tearful looks at the empty chair in the mess and Two's haunted expression that were really doing a number on him. 

And, well. They'd gotten used to each other. The realization crept on him slowly that it was the first time he actually remembered losing someone that he knew, or at least someone he'd known for more than a few hours. (There was Sarah, of course. But Sarah didn't count, because he didn't actually remember her, as such.)

So a little side trip to plunder— that is, salvage a drifting freighter sounded like just the thing to perk everyone up.

Until they actually got on the ship.

It was the same not-quite-right feeling as the zombie ship. The Android and Five—who were both back on the Raza—swore up and down that the scans had come back clear of viruses and the air was fine. But the eeriness grew with every corridor they explored, especially once they found the crew quarters. It was like the crew had just stepped out for a minute. The beds were made; there were family photos, clothes, porn, all the things you'd expect on a long-haul deep-space freighter. The mess still had ration packs on the table. It was like everyone had just stepped out for a minute.

"Have you heard of the Mary Celeste?" Two asked, poking with the muzzle of her weapon at a metal cup with a dried rime of coffee in it. 

"Prostitute?" Three guessed.

"Er ... no. Abandoned ship on Terra Prime."

"You mean in space around Terra Prime."

"No, the old kind of ship." She took her hand off her gun to make a bobbing motion, palm flat. "Goes on water."

"Oh. A boat. Why didn't you just say so?"

Two sighed and gave him one of those looks she had, annoyed and weirdly fond at the same time. "It was found floating with everything still on board, but the entire crew missing." She nudged a door open with her foot. "Like this."

"Two, Three?" Four said over the radio. "Nyx says she's got a bad feeling about this place."

"Oh, she has a feeling. Let's leave then."

"I know how it sounds," Nyx said on the radio. "But there's something just not _right_ here. I've heard of ships having hyperspace accidents, coming out somewhere entirely wrong without a living thing on board. I think we might be on one of those ships."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's any danger to us, right?" Two asked. "It's not in hyperspace _now._ Android, what do you think?"

"There are no documented instances of such events in my data banks," the Android's voice reported. "And there is no reason why such an event, even if it did occur, would be harmful afterwards."

"See," Three said, "we're all jumping at—"

"Though I am receiving unusual energy readings from the ship's engine room."

"Unusual how?" Two asked.

"If I had more precise data, I would not have needed to use the qualifier 'unusual.'"

"Great, now even the robot's jumpy—whoa!"

"What?" Two spun around with her gun at the ready.

"I don't know!" He could have sworn, just for a minute— "Thought I saw someone move over there."

He regretted saying it aloud as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but Two didn't laugh; instead she took a slow look around, sweeping the gun to cover the empty section of hallway he was staring at. Boss lady was as jumpy as he was.

"Over there, you said?"

"Probably nothing." He felt stupid now. Jumping at shadows. "Just nerves."

"Guys?" Five said over the radio. "These energy readings are getting stronger. The Android and I could come over and—"

"No," Two said, beating Three to it. "Stay on the Raza. I don't need anyone else running around on this ship right now. Can we do anything from here?"

"I need someone to take up-close readings from the engine room."

Two looked at Three, who sighed deeply.

"We're probably closest," Two said. "Four, Nyx—how's it going in the cargo bay?"

There was an unusually long silence, and she had opened her mouth to ask again when Four said, "Have you seen anything peculiar where you are?"

"Nope," Three said quickly. "Nothing weird, nada."

"I believe there may be something on the ship with us," Four's voice said.

There was movement at the edge of Three's vision. This time, he turned around slowly, and then he nudged Two, keeping his gun up. 

A woman stood in the hallway. There was something faintly luminescent about her, and almost colorless, like a bad hologram. She was looking, not at him, but past him, her eyes wide in fear. She started to walk toward him.

"You're seeing this, right?" Three muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

"I'm seeing it," Two said grimly. "Hey, you. Identify yourself."

The woman's mouth moved as if she was speaking, but she made no sound. She was still walking toward them, closing rapidly.

"Hey!" Three said. "Stop there!"

Abruptly the woman jerked, threw her arms in front of her face, and vanished. At the same time, there was a yelp over the radio. It sounded like Nyx, who then said, fast and urgent, "We have to leave. We need to get off this ship now."

"Yeah, these energy readings are going wild," Five said. "Guys, get out of there."

As they pelted back to the Marauder, the flickering images were everywhere. Coverall-clad crew members, going through their daily routine, apparently unaware of the visitors. Opening maintenance hatches, taking down ghostly items from ghostly cargo holds—

Five's voice on the radio sounded raw and desperate. "There's definitely something wrong with the hyperdrive. I think it's about to pulse or explode or—something. Please, guys, get _out!"_

"We're tryin'!" Three snapped back. Naturally they were the farthest out, because that was just how his luck ran.

"Four, Nyx—you're back on the Marauder?" Two panted, as they clambered down the ladders in a nonfunctional lift tube. "If it looks like it's about to go, cut loose and get out of here."

"We're waiting for you," Four said simply.

In his haste, Three nearly fell down the last stretch of the ladder. Probably would've broke an ankle at the very least, lethal in their present situation—but Two wordlessly caught him with a fist in his jacket, and they both half-climbed, half-fell down the last few rungs, caught their balance and ran.

The Marauder was still there, the hatch open. They tumbled through, Two slapped the door controls, and Nyx cut them loose. They fell away into the waiting starfield, just as the other ship's drive pulsed and plunged them momentarily into a wash of light. Then they were alone.

"Raza," Two gasped, dropping into a seat. "Report."

"We're fine here," Five said, and Three caught a breath; not that he'd been _worried,_ obviously. "I think Nyx is right. There's something wrong with the hyperdrive. If you'd been on that ship when it jumped, you would have gone with it, and whatever, uh, happened to that other crew might have happened to you."

"So have we just not learned by now that there's usually a reason why they're abandoned, or what?" Three asked, and tried not to notice his hands shaking on the armrests of the seat. And he tried not to think about how some part of him, on that desperate run back to the Marauder, had been confident that they _wouldn't_ be left behind.

**4\. Robot junkyard dogs**

"This was a fucking terrible idea!" Three yelled in the Android's general direction, over the sound of his own gunfire and explosions from somewhere else on the ship. 

"There were no life signs," the Android protested calmly, as she moved with those creepy-fast reflexes to grab one of the robot guard dogs by the throat and casually wrenched its head off.

"Three!" Two snapped over the radio, with the sound of gunfire in the background. "Five! Everyone fall back to the Marauder, now!"

"We're trying!" Three snapped back. "Wait, Five's not with you?"

"I thought she was with you."

"Damn it!"

Before he had a chance to charge across the killer-robot-dog-infested cargo bay in search of Five, all the robots attacking them abruptly seized up and fell over.

"I found their shutdown frequency!" Five shouted, dangling down from a catwalk and waving some sort of mechanical doohickey. "Hang on, let me—oh, er ..." Some of the robot dogs were already stirring and struggling to their feet. "Oh, they can get around it _really_ fast. That's, uh. Not good."

"Marauder!" Three yelled at her. "Now!"

It was getting to be a little too much of a habit, these last-minute dashes for the dubious safety of the shuttle. The Android guarded their retreat, and Three waited until Five was down from the catwalk and running ahead of him before retreating himself.

"I believe we have learned something new about the corporations' security measures," the Android said cheerfully as the Marauder's hatch clanged shut behind them.

"Good for us," Three muttered between his teeth. "I hate our lives." He ruffled Five's hair just to reassure himself that she was fine, and pushed her into a seat as the Marauder decoupled from the ship.

**5\. Chased off by their evil doppelgangers**

"I really, really hate you guys," Three said, looking down the barrel of an alternate-universe version of Lulu (with an extra scratch on the barrel) at his own face—Marcus Boone's face—sneering back at him.

"Guns down or we kill him," Boone said.

"Oh come on, like they're going to—okay, no, _guys,"_ Three protested, as Two and Six reluctantly gave up their guns to the other Portia Lin. "Seriously?"

"We're such utter wimps in this universe, it's just sad," Portia said. "No wonder we keep beating you guys. Wait, where's their android?"

One brief firefight later, they were on the run back to the Marauder (again), Three stumbling along and holding onto Two, who had an arm around him. He hadn't _meant_ to get shot, it was just that evil-alternate-Portia was clearly going to shoot Six and he didn't really have a _choice_.

"This isn't working; we're too slow," Two said, and as Three was trying to work himself up to heroically offering to be left behind, he instead found himself flung over the Android's shoulder.

"Ow," he complained faintly. This was utterly humiliating. From damsel in distress to luggage.

The Android deposited him in a seat on the Marauder. "I will tend him," she said to a desperately anxious-looking Five. 

He looked down at the top of the Android's head while she worked on his arm. The pain was starting to kick in now, making him loopy.

"Hey, thanks for the save," he said, and she gave him one of her weird smiles, which he was almost, a little bit, getting used to.

**+1. .... and one they did.**

Every once in a while, you got a win, and this was theirs: an entire cargo hold of foodstuffs on a ship that had been gone over by pirates. But the pirates had left all the food—it was bulky, didn't keep well, wasn't much value after the sell-by date—and it was all in sealed containers. And there was nice stuff there. Variety. For the first time in a while, they had fruit and vegetables, different kinds of meat ...

It was far too much for them to use, so Two had a plan to trade or simply donate most of it to one of the stations that had been devastated by the recent fighting, which Three wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to, because _fresh meat._ The Android was off meal-planning with her little apron on—whatever made her happy, he supposed—and Five was ...

"Are you torturing that gourd?"

"I'm carving it," Five said. The tip of her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she worked on it. "I read about this. Some planets do it as part of their harvest festival."

"We're not on a planet."

"No," she said, looking up with bits of gourd innards all over her arms and the front of her sweater. "But it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? On planets with seasons, they celebrate the harvest in the fall because it's like a windfall, all of this food now, with more lean times to come ahead."

Three tried to follow her torturous logic. "So you're saying this is like a harvest festival for us."

"Yep. So I read about different customs on various planets. Most of them involve eating a lot, which I thought you'd like."

"I was planning on it anyway."

"Figured. But then there are other things you can do, like decorate."

"With mutilated gourds."

"It's supposed to be a face," Five complained, showing it to him.

"If that's a face, it has three eyes and it's screaming."

"Fine." She pushed an undamaged gourd at him. "See if you can do better."

They were both on their second gourd—somehow it had turned viciously competitive—when Two walked in on them. "Are you two having a food fight?"

"It was Five's idea," Three said shamelessly. Five threw a handful of gourd innards at him. "Okay, yes, now we are, I think."

"We're decorating for a harvest festival," Five said. She turned her hacked-up gourd around. "See?"

"By ... mutilating food?"

"Mine is better," Three said. "At least you can tell what it is. Right?"

"It's ... a gourd?"

"Ha," Five said cheerfully. She reached for another gourd.

"So ... I'll be on the bridge," Two said, and backed out of the mess carefully, as if she thought whatever was wrong with them was contagious.

"In some cultures—" the Android began, right behind Three. He yelped and almost involuntarily hurled his gourd across the room. Five, in the path of fire, ducked. "The contents of such carved fruits are used to make pastries."

"Don't sneak up on people," Three snapped, hunching protectively over his half-carved gourd. Then he caught up with what she'd actually said. "Pastries, huh?"

"I have downloaded several recipes that the Raza's databanks assure me are very enticing." The Android picked up a gourd in each hand and vanished into the kitchen.

"So either we'll have pastries for dinner, or she'll set the kitchen on fire." He looked up at Five, who was digging carefully at her fresh gourd with the tip of her knife. "Where'd you get the idea for this whole harvest festival thing, anyway?"

There was a brief silence, and then Five said, mostly to the gourd, "On Titch's world—your world—they had a festival like this. I did it with them."

 _Oh. Looking up harvest festival customs, my ass._ "You know I don't remember any of that, kid. And it wasn't real. _They_ weren't real."

"I know," Five said, to the gourd. She glanced up. "But _I_ remember. And that makes it a little bit real ... doesn't it?"

There was no way he was going to say "no" to that expression. "Yeah, I guess it does."

"And it's the only childhood I actually remember." She made a face. "Even if it's yours."

"Hey!"

Five grinned. She set the gourd down. "How about this one?"

"Looks like you."

"I think that's supposed to be an insult, but I'll take it as a compliment." Smiling, she arranged her row of gourds on the table.

"What else did they do?" Three asked. "At Titch's harvest festival." It was much easier than saying "mine"—because it wasn't ... not his, and not Marcus's either, because Marcus was an asshole and had tried to kill them and didn't deserve anything nice. But Titch was ... someone else. Not him, not Marcus. Like a character on a vid show, not entirely real.

But Five was grinning now, a flash of her really happy grin, and he knew he'd asked the right question, for once. "Well, they dress up in costumes."

"Costumes," he said, with a sinking feeling.

"I bet the Android will let us use her collection of hats."

"I just bet she will."

Five jumped to her feet, looking delighted and shedding bits of gourd. "C'mon. You get first hat choice."

_Maybe one of the corporations will attack. Or the alternate versions of us. I wouldn't mind some zombies right about now either._

But Five was lit up with delight, and he didn't have the heart to say no. Wiping gourd guts off his hands onto his pants, he followed her.


End file.
